Articles by Rob Buckley

About Rob Buckley
I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.
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ITV3: the network that doesn’t like to advertise

10 November 2005 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

ITV3 has been around for some time, mainly in the guise of Granada Plus before it got rebranded. It now has another relative, ITV4, which is supposed to be a “man’s channel”, showing American imports among other things.

Good theory. So why is it that all the good American imports are on ITV3? You wouldn’t know they were there because there’s no advertising. Yet, Numb3rs debuted on there a few weeks ago, as did Touching Evil (the US version). What does ITV4 have? The re-make of Kojak, which was so bad I stopped watching after ten minutes.

Sure ITV3 is essentially still the home of Poirot repeats, but they should think about moving over the new US imports to ITV4 if they’re not going to waste them.

Fox now has a battle of the preposterous on its hands

10 November 2005 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Prison Break turned out to be better than expected, much to Fox’s surprise. Yet, with the juggernaut that is 24 returning in January, it looks like Prison Break is going to be pre-empted from November to May. Quite a wait, one that could get the show cancelled.

Fox isn’t exactly packed with quality programming. While Prison Break isn’t Shakespeare, it does have some nice touches. Joining the honourable ranks of Monk and Touching Evil in pointing out the flipside of mental illness, Prison Break‘s hero turns out to have both low self-esteem and “low latent inhibition” – a disorder that makes him see objects as the sums of their parts, rather than just objects. It’s a handy, escape-plan compatible condition that works well in conjunction with another that lets you get sent to prison so you can rescue your brother. Yes, the mentally ill can be heros and their disorders can be advantages.

So Fox is clearly a little loopy to think that 24 is just so great that everything else should be cleared to make room for it. At the very least, moving Prison Break to one of the prime-time slots used by the deadwood that fills most days except Monday wouldn’t be a bad idea, particularly since it is doing well in the ratings despite baseball, etc.

£120m for Friends Reunited

8 November 2005 Rob Buckley Post a comment

ITV, apparently having decided its output is so high quality it can waste money on dotcom acquisitions, has decided to spend £120 million on Friends Reunited. Nutters.
Does anyone really bother with Friends Reunited any more? I haven’t updated my entry in a year. Neither has anyone else at any of the schools, clubs, workplaces, etc that I went to. The bulletin boards aren’t clogged up with people chatting. None of the people who failed to sign up when it was at its peak have had a change of heart recently.
It’s dead. It’s so 2001-2003.
If ITV really has that much money to throw around, perhaps it might like to spend more on decent programming and its ITN contract so that the latter’s journalists can afford to eat food for a change.

Gordon Ramsay’s manly recipes

5 November 2005 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

I’ve signed up for tickets for The F Word, Gordon Ramsay’s cooking and chat show. Unlike the BBC’s tickets request service, this required filling out about a dozen questions, including “Favourite Chef” (Gordon, of course), “Favourite meal ever had” (Bradley Ogden’s at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. That was some tasty food) and profession (see how well “Freelance journalist” goes down).

Continue reading “Gordon Ramsay’s manly recipes”

H&M=S&M. Well, S anyway.

2 November 2005 Rob Buckley Post a comment

I found the longest 10 minutes of my life tonight. They were hidden between 6.40pm and 6.50pm at Greenwich filmworks. Who’d have thought it?
I’d gone to see Serenity but found anything but (do you like what I did there?). Serenity itself was nice enough, although I felt like I’d walked in during act three of a play and all the good stuff had already happened. The first two acts must have been good, because the audience at the back were snivelling away like nobody’s business by the end. Clearly, they knew something I didn’t.
No, the particular problem I had was with an advert: H&M’s Romeo & Juliet. Not only was it awful, a “romantic”, musical jeans advert based around drive-by shootings (!), it just went on forever. A few minutes in, people were gnawing their own legs off for relief. When it finished, there were audible sighs of relief and bemusement something that bad had been foisted on us.
A Google search reveals that not only is this ad reviled around the world, it has been hastily dropped in Canada. It’s even caused people who previously liked the company, to despise them.
Yes, friends, it really is that bad. If you go to see Serenity, sneak in after the ads if you can.